Guten Tag, liebe Leser! Recently, as part of my back to basics post, I linked to a post from the archives that deals with German possessive pronouns – that is, how to say things like ‘her book’ , ‘his hat’, ‘our cat’, and so on. Now I’d like to go over German indefinite pronouns.

What are German indefinite pronouns?

These are pronouns that do not indicate the gender or number of things/people discussed. To put it simply, they are those vague words like ‘somebody’, ‘everybody’, ‘a few’, and ‘some’. Why are these important to learn? Because sometimes we aren’t able to be – or don’t want to be – too specific!
(Note some of the words’ endings here might change in real speech, according to the gender of the subject. But the main thing at this stage is that you get a feel for how these words look and sound. 🙂 )

This post reminds me of that great song from the movie The Comedian Harmonists (which was in German with English subtitles) – “Irgendwo auf der Welt” – look it up on youtube, worth a listen. All the songs in that film were fabulous. This one was sung as the goodbye tune in the last concert before the group was broken up by forced emigration.